1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an improved distributed data processing system and in particular to an improved method and apparatus for managing data processing systems within a distributed data processing system. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to a method and apparatus for pre-loading data within a distributed data processing system.
2. Description of Related Art
A computer includes both a physical machine, namely the hardware, and the instructions which cause the physical machine to operate, namely the software. Software includes both application and operating system programs. If the program is simply to do tasks for a user, such as solving specific problems, it is referred to as application software. If a program controls the hardware of the computer and the execution of the application programs, it is called operating system software. System software further includes the operating system, the program which controls the actual computer or central processing unit (CPU), and device drivers which control the input and output devices (I/O) such as printers and terminals.
A general purpose computer is fairly complicated. Usually a queue of application programs is present waiting to use the CPU. The operating system will need to determine which program will run next, how much of the CPU time it will be allowed to use and what other computer resources the application will be allowed to use. Further, each application program will require a special input or output device and the application program must transfer its data to the operating system, which controls the device drivers.
A network containing a number of computers may be formed by having these computers, also referred to as "nodes" or "network computers", communicate with each other over one or more communications links, which is an aggregation which is a computer network. Today, many computer workstations are connected to other workstations, file servers, or other resources over a local area network (LAN). Each computer on a network is connected to the network via an adapter card or other similar means, which provides an ability to establish a communications link to the network.
Recently, in a many network computer paradigms, applications are stored on a server and are sent to other network computers (NCs), also referred to as "clients".
A problem exists for network-loaded applications or images. In a network computing environment, when a client's system applications are accessed across the network, a run time problem in the application may occur due to constraints, such as, network traffic, application or image size, or initialization of the image. Such a situation may result in minutes being required to execute an application or portions of the application. In addition, as an application is executed on a client, additional code in the form of pages may be required to continue execution of the application. In such an instance, these additional pages are downloaded from the server, requiring additional access across the network. A "page" is a fixed size block of memory. When a page is used in a paging memory system, a page is a block of memory whose physical address can be changed via mapping hardware.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to have an improved method and apparatus for executing applications across a network.